Chen Guangcheng, blind Chinese lawyer-activist, escapes house arrest

Escaped dissident said to be under protection of U.S. diplomats in China

Washington Post By Keith B. Richburg, Updated: Friday,April 27, 11:47 AM

 

BEIJING — Chen Guangcheng, the blind, self-taught lawyer known for his outspokenopposition to China’s forced abortion and sterilization policies, has escaped from house arrest and posted a dramatic YouTube video calling on Premier Wen Jiabao to investigate his case and protect his family.

Some Republicans in Congress have criticized the administration for not offering asylum to Wang, saying he possessed valuable information and could now be persecuted. But Wang was never considered a serious asylum case because of his background as a sometimes brutal law enforcer in Chongqing. Chen, on the other hand, is a well-known activist and rights campaigner whose plight has attracted international attention. And his escape comes at a delicate time when Washington is trying to enlist Beijing’s help on a range of global issues, from containing the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea to helping broker a cease-fire in Syria.

There are several examples of temporary refuge given at U.S. diplomatic installations, but “posts may not grant or in any way promise ‘asylum’ to any foreign national,” according to Foreign Service regulations. Asylum is granted only to applicants in the United States or at a port of entry.

 

An example of temporary refuge granted in China was when noted scientist Fang Lizhi, whose advocacy for democracy helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, sought protection from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, sparking a lengthy diplomatic standoff with the Chinese government. He remained inside the embassy for a year until Chinese authorities allowed him to leave China, in June 1990, for medical treatment.

Chen’s case has attracted attention, both inside China and abroad, because he had already served a 51-month sentence imposed after a sham trial on largely discredited charges of “obstructing traffic.”

 

Following his release, in September 2010, he was taken to his farmhouse in Dongshigu village and kept under an unofficial kind of house arrest, surrounded by armed thugs in plain clothes who prevented Chen and his wife from leaving and brutally blocked journalists and activists from going to see him.

 

Among those roughed up trying to see Chen was “Batman” star Christian Bale, who was in China filming a movie, “The Flowers of War.” Bale’s treatment helped further spotlight Chen’s confinement, which is unlawful even under China’s constitution and laws but has become a common way for the country’s security services to deal with those who they consider to be dangerous dissidents and troublemakers.

 

Phelim Kine, senior Asia researcher for the group Human Rights Watch, said Chen’s case “highlights the yawning divide between the government’s often lofty rhetoric about rule of law and the far grimmer reality endured by people like Chen, who challenge the status quo by merely seeking to access rights and freedoms guaranteed by China’s laws and constitution.”

 

“While the Chinese government has made much of its commitment to rule of law through its investigations of former Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai and his activities in Chongqing,” Kine said in an e-mailed statement, “the Chinese government has allowed a small army of plainclothes thugs to brazenly flout Chinese law in Dongshigu with utter impunity.”

Kine said Chen’s house arrest over the past 19 months amounted to “effectively a de facto and de jure kidnapping by elements of the security apparatus.”

 

Hu Jia, another prominent activist and friend of the Chen family, said Chen arrived in Beijing on Monday and was currently in the U.S. Embassy under the protection of U.S. diplomats. The embassy would neither confirm nor deny that he was there.

 

“As far as I know, he is in the U.S. Embassy, the safest place in China,” Hu said. “He is in the U.S. Embassy, or under the shelter of diplomats at least. I’m not sure if he’s going to ask for political asylum or not. I don’t know if he still wants to stay in China.”

All information about Chen has now been censored on Sina Weibo, the popular microblogging site that often serves as an alternative news source in China.

“Premier Wen, with great difficulty, I have escaped,” Chen announced in the video message.

Regardless of whether the U.S. government is currently helping shelter Chen, his escape from his village in Shandong province on Sunday, and the video detailing abuse he and his wife suffered under house arrest, seemed likely to embarrass the Beijing government just days before Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner arrive for a long-scheduled talks on political and economic matters. Clinton has repeatedly called for Chen’s release.

“Since this happened just one week before the Sino-U.S. strategic dialogue, the timing is good,” Hu said. “Chen must be able to meet the U.S. human rights specialist and hopefully, he will meet Clinton.”

“This is an election year in the U.S.,” Hu said. “The Republicans are also watching what [President] Obama will do on this case.”

State Department officials in Washington were silent on Chen’s whereabouts, neither confirming nor denying reports that the dissident had taken refuge in the U.S. Embassy, and refusing to comment at all about his status.

It is extremely rare, but not unprecedented, for detained activists to evade their captors and escape from house arrest in China. Chen’s escape, which apparently was planned over several weeks, raised fears that he could face severe reprisals if he is caught.

 

Chen’s case attracted attention, both inside China and abroad, because he had already served a 51-month sentence imposed after a sham trial on largely discredited charges of “obstructing traffic.”

Following his release, in September 2010, he was taken to his farmhouse in Dongshigu village and kept under an unofficial kind of house arrest, surrounded by armed thugs in plain clothes who prevented Chen and his wife from leaving and brutally blocked journalists and activists from going to see him.

Among those roughed up trying to see Chen was “Batman” star Christian Bale, who was in China filming a movie, “The Flowers of War.” Bale’s treatment helped further spotlight Chen’s confinement, which is unlawful even under China’s constitution and laws but has become a common way for the country’s security services to deal with those who they consider to be dangerous dissidents and troublemakers.

 


According to activist sources with knowledge of Chen’s escape, it happened last Sunday. Chen had apparently planned his departure for weeks, pretending to be bedridden in hopes that those guarding his farmhouse would become less attentive.

 

Hu said Chen had to climb over a high wall, which was especially difficult because Chen is blind. “His story is the Chinese version of the Shawshank Redemption,” Hu said.

 

ChinaAid, a Christian human rights group based in Texas, reported that He Peirong, a friend who helped Chen with his plans and apparently drove him from his home, has since been arrested at her home in Nanjing. Witnesses said He was taken away by security officials; efforts by The Washington Post to reach her were unsuccessful.

 

ChinaAid also reported that Chen’s older brother and a nephew were arrested following the escape.

 

In his video message, Chen, wearing his characteristic dark glasses and seated before a white curtain, addresses Wen and announces that he has escaped.

 

Chen goes on to say that the reports of abuse he suffered “are all true. And the reality is more serious than the descriptions online.”

Chen says he still fears for his family. “My mother, my wife and my children are still in their clutches,” he says.

 

And he urged Wen to investigate corruption in his area.

 

“The money of our ordinary people and the taxpayers should not be used by some local officials who break the law to hurt people or hurt the image of our party,” Chen says. “Many people don’t understand whether all of these illegal acts are just law-breaking by the local party officials or whether it was ordered by the Central Committee. I think you should give a clear answer to people before long.”

 

A link to the video was sent to multiple Web sites, activists said, including Boxun.com, an overseas Chinese community Web site run from Durham, N.C.

Watson Meng, 47, who runs Boxun.com, said he did not know where Chen was or whether the U.S. Embassy was sheltering him. He said an activist contact in Beijing sent the video link to him via Skype and that someone in China had uploaded the video to the Microsoft Web site, Live.com.

 

Separately, a friend of Meng’s in Beijing sent a Skype message to him that had come from activist Guo Yushan. “Dear Friends, Chen Guangcheng has left Shandung magically,” the message said. “He is free at the moment. He is in a safe place. Chen Guangcheng authorized me to send three requests to Premier Wen Jiabao.” Chen discussed the requests in the video.

 

“This is a very exciting and encouraging development that Chen was able to escape from tight surveillance and enjoy some freedom,” said Bob Fu, the founder and president of ChinaAid.

 

Fu declined to comment on the current whereabouts of Chen but said the blind lawyer is far more deserving of American protection than Wang, the former Chongqing police chief.

 

Washington Post researcher Zhang Jie in Beijing, correspondent Andrew Higgins and staff writers Joby Warrick and Ellen Nakashima in Washington contributed to this report.

 

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Comments: 2
  • #1

    Legal Blog (Tuesday, 06 August 2013 05:57)

    I found this blog informative and the stuff you have provided about the Chen case in detail is worth appreciating.

  • #2

    Andy (Saturday, 26 October 2013 04:27)

    These blogs are quite incredible that have provided the best knowledge.

Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”

 

This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”

 

Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.

 

The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.

 

And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.

 

Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.

 

But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.

 

Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.

 

So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.

 

In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.

 

Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.

 

Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”

 

There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.

 

“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.

 

Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.

 

There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.

 

________________________________

 

A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.

0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.

 

Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.

Zhou Family Ties

1 Comments

Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

Read More 0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

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